Harry Mudd (who got the robots he deserved):
Posted on 04/03/2012 5:37:44 AM PDT by reaganaut1
...
[Computer science] students are overwhelmingly male. In 2010, just 18.2 percent of undergraduates in the field were women, according to the National Center for Education Statistics — in spite of gains in chemistry, biomechanical engineering and other so-called STEM fields (the acronym stands for science, technology, engineering and mathematics).
“It must be the unique area of science and technology where women have made negative progress,” said Nicholas Pippenger, a mathematics professor at Harvey Mudd, who is married to Dr. Klawe.
Dr. Klawe and others say the underrepresentation of women in the field is detrimental in a larger sense. Computer science, they say, is as vital to propelling society forward in the digital era as mechanical engineering was in the industrial age.
“If we’re not getting more women to be part of that, it’s just nuts,” Dr. Klawe said. At Mudd, she continued, “we’re graduating 20 female computer science majors a year, and every one of them is a gem.” In 2005, the year before Dr. Klawe arrived, a group of faculty members embarked on a full makeover of the introductory computer science course, a requirement at Mudd.
Known as CS 5, the course focused on hard-core programming, appealing to a particular kind of student — young men, already seasoned programmers, who dominated the class. This only reinforced the women’s sense that computer science was for geeky know-it-alls.
“Most of the female students were unwilling to go on in computer science because of the stereotypes they had grown up with,” said Zachary Dodds, a computer scientist at Mudd. “We realized we were helping perpetuate that by teaching such a standard course.”
To reduce the intimidation factor, the course was divided into two sections — “gold,” for those with no prior experience, and “black” for everyone else.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Women good, men bad.
These disciplines require mastery, at least to a certain level. Yes, computers help a great deal, and in engineering, there are companies that specialize in doing a lot of the low-level "grunt" work.
But STEM stands in stark contrast to rest of the made-up world of academia. Its demands on the mind are rigorous, and there are those who can't cut it. That sticks in the craw of these elites.
Too bad for them.
Harvey Mudd? As in Harcort Fenton Mudd? From Star Trek?
FWIW, in 1987 my CS-101 class at SUNY Stony Brook had hundreds of students, and just a handful were female. This isn't anything new.
Mark
“I guess the goal is to have women dominate all fields.”
It is. That way they stop having kids, and Western Society withers on the vine. We may laugh at Muzzies for being so backwards regarding their treatment of women - but there are CHILDREN in those societies, and demographically they’re heads and shoulders more healthy than ANY Western Society.
And barring a global religious war that they lose, they WILL start taking countries in Europe by 2030 and they will keep getting stronger in other countries.
I guess the goal is to have women dominate all fields...
...absolutely that is the cultural ideal, but all the while this dominance is being built, they must maintain their status as underpriveleged, lest the scheme be exposed for the social engineering that it is...thus, the notion of underpaid women in the work force is aggressively pushed, the illogical idea of employers hiring men when they supposedly could hire women at half price notwithstanding...
Harvey Mudd is a really, really good school. Small and focused on math and science, so it doesn’t make headlines.
The number of women in CS has actually gone down since the 80s, probably because of the introduction of “computer information technology” type degrees. There were always a few other women in my CS classes but most of them were interested in web or database design. By the time I got to grad school I was usually one of maybe 2 or 3 American women in my classes.
Didn’t bug me, I don’t like being around other women much either. There’s a lot of good reasons women don’t go into computer science, most of which say more about our school systems or the industry than anything else.
I don't think I'd have gotten out of third grade if I put that on a paper.
This was tried back in the mid-nineties during the dotcom boom. I went to engineering school back then and there was a big push to get young women interested in engineering at the high school level. They did a good job herding the gals into the engineering schools, but they hit what’s called “The Physics Barrier” and dropped out into other kinder, gentler degree programs.
Isn’t it all about “choice” for women? It looks like they are not choosing this career path. No harm, no foul, I say.
The first computer programmer was a lady.
Ada Lovelace didn’t require affirmative action: why should her heirs?
Harry Mudd (who got the robots he deserved):
my 20 yo tall blonde pretty niece is a junior in the honors program at the U of Akron in mechanical engineering. She has had co-op jobs with GE for the last two summers and will be co-oping with Proctor and Gamble this summer. she’s extremely bright. She must have surmounted the Physics barrier.
Black and Gold grouping sounds very familiar.
A and B Sections
College and Career Tracks
Robin and Bluebird Study Groups
It all amounts to the same thing.
Heys! I am female with TWO comp sci degrees. But I already proved I am smart......I am a Freeper.
From Ada to Linda. What a difference a century makes.
Yeah well there are always freepers on these threads who opine either: that women can’t make it in a math/sci field OR that if one doesn’t major in math/science one will be a burden on society and should basically just off themselves immediately. So sometimes being a Freeper isn’t the best credential ; )
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